Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Miranda’s ‘I am your wife, if you will marry me…’ he tartly opposes ‘the pathetic old poem of
The nut-brown maid’ as a more likely inspiration. 31 On Steevens’s objection to Ferdinand’s
‘This wooden slavery, than to suffer’ (Act III sc i) as ungrammatical Douce backs Malone in
arguing for it because it is: ‘Shakespeare’s language, and ought therefore to be restored. Mr
Steevens objects on the score of defective metre: but this is not the case; the metre however
rugged, is certainly perfect’. 32 Shakespeare himself, a creature of the vernacular, more familiar
with folk songs than Latin, is also, however rugged, to be respected, even when he arouses
anxiety in an antiquary who likes his terms clearly defined. The Tempest sends Douce off down
beguiling byways such as the ‘rare old collection of songs….Hunting, hawking, dauncing,
drinking, enamoring’ one of which is the ‘Urchins Dance’ (‘By the moone we sport and
play,/With the night begins our day’). 33 The inclusion of the verse also serves to get the
commentator out of a difficult corner into which he has argued himself on the question of
whether the urchins that Prospero sends to plague Caliban are sprites, or hedgehogs or whether
the term is one of those which Shakespeare uses ambiguously and therefore ‘should be taken in
both or either of their senses’. 34
Douce’s dislike of ambiguity and his determination to nail every last point caused him to
give some hostages to fortune. Anyone wishing to satirise the antiquarian approach to
Shakespeare needed only to quote him on Act IV, sc i: ‘Mr Collins’s note, it is presumed, will
not be thought worth retaining in any future edition. His account of the barnacle is extremely
confused and imperfect.’ 35 At another moment, discussing Midsummer Night’s Dream, his
determination to bring to each disputed point the reasoned voice of scholarship tips him into
inadvertent fantasy. Hoping to settle the dispute between Steevens and Ritson on the immortality
or otherwise of fairies in the play, Douce comes down firmly in favour of Ritson’s ‘ingenious
and decisive’ argument for immortality, glossing Titania’s reference in Act I sc ii to ‘human
mortals’ as ‘merely a pleonasm’. 36 Shakespeare, unlike Spenser, did not, Douce goes on, have
31 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare 1, p.19.
32 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare 1, p.18.
33 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare 1, p. 11.
34 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare 1, p. 11.
35 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare 1, p. 23.
36 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare 1, p. 185.
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